


Car Talk

by gonfalonier



Category: Manic Street Preachers
Genre: M/M, Talking, complicated adult emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 02:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17112515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gonfalonier/pseuds/gonfalonier
Summary: James and Nick talk about things, and around things, on a chauffeured road trip to nowhere.





	Car Talk

Nicky’s in coats and leggings and he’s stretched out sidelong across the seat with his legs in James’s lap. He’s comfortable, lounging, shoes long abandoned, and he’s taking his mineral water in delicate sips. They’re being driven upland to some place to have some conversation with some person. An opaque divider is between the two of them and their driver: not their idea. In the meantime they’ve been talking about old times, good times -- they’ve been reminiscing around the bad times because they’ve got another two hours in the car and don’t want to spend it moping and stewing in their own nonsense.

“You were never lonely,” Nick says, grinning, as he nudges JD’s thigh with his socked heel. The talk has turned to sex. Fine. A hell subject for James that makes him stutter and shrug, giving Nicky more ammunition for his shit-cannon.

“We couldn’t all have your monkish self-control, Nich’las,” he says back, looking up at the grey padded ceiling of the car. “Sometimes there’s a need.” He swings his gaze over to Nick, who’s finally pushed his shades up onto his head so the two of them can see eye-to-eye. Nick’s grinning like a bastard. James gives him a tweak on his bony ankle and adds, “Anyway, you’d know. Couldn’t ever be lonely with Wildcat Wire in the place. Surprised I still have a cock attached, the way you used to get after it.”

James can feel his cheeks burn when he says it. Nick’s eyes go wide and his mouth opens in a faux scandalized gasp. Nick says, amused, “I would never. I would never.”

“Shut up.”

“Oh dear, no, you’ve stepped in it now.”

Back to the ceiling. James thumps his head back and rests a placating hand on Nick’s knee. “I’m only saying,” he says, “I was pleased to be your experiment. I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

In his periphery, James can see Nicky move. “Experiment,” says Nick. He rolls the word in his mouth and hisses on the _x_. The next time he speaks, his voice is much closer, much softer; a tone James knows so well. “Jamesy. Do you honestly think you were something new for me?”

It hadn’t occurred to him. Yes, of course he was new; they’d been together every minute as young’uns. Nicky could barely take a shit without James knowing all about it. The first time Nick had sucked him off, sloppy and terrible, next to a dumpster outside a club -- the name lost to time and booze -- James figured then, and now, that it was the first time, full stop.

Nick must read his face because he tsks and then kisses him on the cheek and says, “Charming. Truly.”

Nick’s in his lap now, properly. He’s heavy and splendid and pretty. His skin is soft, and James can’t resist giving him a kiss on the cheek. Nicky plucks his sunglasses off the top of his head and drops them on the floor and shakes his hair back so he can receive James’s full attention.

James fiddles with a clasp on Nick’s coat and says, “All right. Coy. Who was it, then? Who got to you.” He throws Nick a smile. “Give it to me quick, now, don’t break my heart.”

“Well.” Nick lays his hand on James’s on the clasp and helps him undo it, then the next, then the next. Magnificently, he kneels up, head tipped to the side and cheek against the ceiling, and shrugs out of the coat to reveal a nice top, purple and silky, with a loose bow at the neck. James indulges himself by cupping the backs of Nick’s thighs and giving a squeeze. They could drop the conversation here and turn to other entertainments and James would be just fine. Just fine. But instead Nick settles back down sidesaddle on him and gives him a nuzzle on the cheek with his nose. He says to James, “Do you remember Ian Dolan?”

Tall. Mean. Snooty. James wrinkles his nose. “Yeah?”

“It wasn’t him.” Nick’s voice has grown musical, the way it always does when he’s playing, when he’s enjoying himself. He teases JD with a few more names, some of them friends and some of them horrible, one of them a priest, because Nick is who he always has been. James is only half-listening, mouthing on Nicky’s throat when he hears, “I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me,” he mutters against Nick’s skin.

“I’ll tell you that it was Oliver Inmoor.”

Doesn’t that give him pause. “Y’right?” he says to Nick. “Short and wide? Got on the trumpet? That one?”

“That’s the boy.” And James knows it is. Nick sounds misty, the way he gets when he’s telling the truth.

“Oliver. I never would’ve figured him.”

Another tsk from Nick. “My charms are powerful, James Dean.”

“Notoriously.”

Nick sighs and says, “He liked me. He adored me. Ao we tinkered about.” He laughs, a chiming sound. “I looked things up in books at the library and tried to recreate them with him, to varying degrees of success.”

James laughs too, but just a huff. His chest feels full. Oliver had broad hands, he remembers, stubby fingers, a square face that was mostly phlegmatic. Hardly an oil painting. Nick deserved better for his first time. Not that James would have been that for him, a fumbling, onanistic yob who spent more time fiddling with a guitar than making eye contact with anyone.

Nicky rolls his head to the side and tucks his hair off his neck and says, “Just here, darling.” James licks his lips and kisses the spot obediently, and Nick moans on an exhale and then tells him, “He had me, you know. Oliver. He did me proper, among all the other things we tried.”

“Speak sense,” mumbles James, though he knows just what’s being said.

“He fucked me, James.” He draws out the fricative in fucked, delighting himself and only himself. “Square up the arse. More than once. More than twice.”

“God.” James bites him. Sinks his teeth down into the tender juncture of shoulder and neck and sucks and then pulls away. It’s meant to be a punishment to himself and to Nick. Nick just seeks out JD’s hand with his own and tugs it to where his dick is plumped up and hot.

Nicky pants, “Are you jealous, James. Jamesy. Are you furious that it wasn’t you.”

“Shut up.”

“You are. It suits you. Shall I tell you the others?”

“Shut up.”

“Just a few. Each one delicious.”

James gives Nick a squeeze, harder than he should, to make Nick yelp. It doesn’t stop Nick’s mouth though. Nothing can.

Nick says, viciously, “I had Noel. We went at it like a honeymoon. I begged him to fuck me.” He turns his head and catches James in a kiss that James tries to resist but can’t. He can’t. “Did you hear me,” Nick says against his lips. He never mumbles, not even when he should. “I told him please. Just like that. Please.”

The roar of the road outside sounds like the ocean, like a wave building up over them. James is jealous and has no interest in denying it. He’s watched Nicky get up to all sorts of mischief, and he knows, of course he knows, that there have been times Nick’s enjoyed himself without him as an audience. But he hates this. He hates hearing this litany of sins he hasn’t seen committed by men he calls his friends, knowing he could have done a better job than any of them if he’d been there to lend a hand. In the car now, in the sequestered backseat, behind tinted glass and hidden from all eyes but Nick’s, James’s dick as hard as a fucking chunk of obsidian.

Nick realizes it too. his clever fingers find their way to James’s zip and push down to force from James’s throat an embarrassing eurk. “What’ll we do with this?” Nicky asks him with a delirious laugh. “Since it’s still attached, for the time being.”

“Leave off,” James grunts. “You hateful cunt.”

Nick laughs again. “Listen to you. Too good for me now?” He settles into a smile. It isn’t unkind. The swelling noise of the road begins to fade off in James’s ears. Nick moves his hand up to stroke down the bridge of James’s nose. “It hurts you, doesn’t it. Knowing you weren’t the one that plucked me.”

James doesn’t answer. He’s puffing from the hardon and the tension. His cheeks and ears are burning, and where Nicky touches his face it feels like soothing ice.

“I’ve had you,” Nick murmurs to him. There’s this tone he gets when he’s trying to appease, when he knows he’s done wrong or said some evil shit, some too-far shit, a tone that’s meant to act as an apology. This isn’t that tone. “I’ve had you, too, James.”

The twist in James’s gut as his dick starts to go soft feels like being stepped on. “Yeah,” he says to the ceiling of the car. There’s sweat cooling on his forehead. “I reckon you have, Nick, right from the start.”

“Don’t be like that,” says Nick, before he touches his lips to James’s exposed throat. He kisses and then licks a stripe along the unshaved skin there. “You’ve always been the best.”

And then Nick pulls away, pushes himself back, sprawls back out on the seat, and presents himself to be adored.


End file.
